For many ecommerce websites Organic Traffic is the staple source of revenue for their online shop. Driven by effective search engine optimisation, digital PR and smart marketing strategies search engine optimisation takes time to build up and then effort to maintain against competitors.
For many years the fear of negative SEO has been real.
An aggressive competitor or grumpy ex-employee could (for not much money) wreak havoc by implementing negative SEO.
Negative SEO refers to malicious practices aimed at harming a competitor’s search engine rankings. These unethical techniques can include building spammy links to trigger penalties, scraping and republishing content to create duplicate content issues, hacking to alter or damage a website, posting fake negative reviews to tarnish a competitor’s reputation, and launching negative social media campaigns to spread false information.
The goal of negative SEO is to reduce the visibility and ranking of a competitor’s website in search engine results, ultimately driving less traffic to their site and potentially impacting their business negatively.
In a recent interview with Gary Illyes, an Analyst on the Google Search team, Gary confirmed that Google now ignores low quality links, effectively eradicating negative seo as a strategy.
“If you see links from completely irrelevant sites, be that p–n sites or or pure spam sites or whatever, you can safely assume that we disabled the links from those sites because, one of the things is that we try to match the the topic of the target page plus whoever is linking out, and if they don’t match then why on Earth would we use those links?
Like for example if someone is linking to your flower page from a Canadian casino that sells Viagra without prescription, then why would we trust that link?
I would say that I would not worry about it. Like, find something else to worry about.”
This is great news for many business owners and marketing teams. A popular website will always pick up low quality links but now there is no need to disavow them in Google search Console – just focus on creating high quality links with rich content.
